April 2006

above: West 4 Street near 7th, Greenwich Village Maniacally busy schedule this weekend. Finishing a chapter for another book, helping a friend pack for a move, leading a ForgottenTour. Too much for…

In February 2005 I spent seven days in Staten Island. While many Manhattanites would consider that tantamount to a sentence to life without BlackBerries or having the Republicans in Madison Square…

CONTINUED FROM JACKSON HEIGHTS/EAST ELMHURST PART 1 Name That Plane Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, between Ditmars Blvd., 23rd Avenue and 90th Street, has quite the little collection of…

In a borough largely ignored by NYC’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the magnificent garden apartments of Jackson Heights are a happy exception. Today’s Jackson Heights is a neighborhood of handsome six-story co-operative…

Forgotten Fans wave with Minerva In what was undoubtedly the best weather ever for a ForgottenTour (sunny and 68) forty Forgotten fans (and one heckler!) converged on Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, a…

Before modern efficiencies, milk and milk products were done on a local scale. Eventually due to New York City’s swelling population, larger facilities were needed. There were many private companies filling…

When I first started researching NYC history I assumed that Sheepshead Bay was named for its one-time resemblance, in outline, to a sheep’s head. After all, that’s how a peninsula on…

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 2 We’ve run out of letters The town of Flatbush, absorbed into Brooklyn in the 1890s, had its own tidy street naming system: East and West…

CONTINUED FROM SHEEPSHEAD BAY, PART 1 Up in the old hotels Brian Merlis, in the title of his Sheepshead Bay book, calls Sheepshead Bay “Brooklyn’s Gold Coast.” After Austin Corbin built…